Twenty years on the Net
Saturday, October 13th, 2012 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manLast week, or possibly the week before, when I was too busy to post (oh all right, I forgot) marks twenty years since I hit the Net. (I'd been online beforehand: during the eighties my father would go online with his 9600 baud modem to, for example, download music for my Hybrid Music System (for the BBC Micro) from sites such as Dudley College of Technology; but that was not on the Internet.)
When I joined Cambridge University, I applied for an account on their elderly mainframe Phoenix (so named because it rose, not from the ashes, but from the crashes). Mine was the last year in which people had to apply for such an account; from the following year new students automatically got an account on the replacement mail system Hermes.
I didn't use the Internet (as opposed to intra-university email or IMing) much in those days; just a few emails with a friend at Westminster University. For some reason, I was very nervous about trying unfamiliar things out on a computer, in case I got into trouble—and, on a PC, everything was unfamiliar to me, as (after an initial introduction to computers on Sinclair machines) I'd pitched my tent in the Acorn camp in 1984, and remained there until the mid nineties. It took me a year to even try typing win (to launch Windows from DOS), but thereafter I rapidly discovered Usenet, in October 1993 (embarrassingly, one month into the infamous September that never ended), although I didn't try posting there until summer the following year. (I'd link to my first post, but it's lost in the howling wilderness of lost links that is the former Dejanews archive, at Google Groups. :-()
My introduction to the Web was also a little tardy. My mother sent me a newspaper article on it, but I didn't really understand what it was saying. The article included URLs at sites in Cambridge; I could recognise IP addresses, userids and paths in them but didn't get how they all fit together. I didn't find out until the summer of 1994 when, wanting to find out what this Mosaic was that everyone was talking about, I looked at the Unix manual page, which left me none the wiser, then tried typing mosaic, and the rest, as they say, was history.
(Actually, I wrote down my reaction to my maiden voyage on Mosaic at the time, in form of a description to show my family; not familiar with the terminology I flailed around in it trying to describe what was a completely new experience to me. Much to my annoyance, the document went missing a few years later; I've been searching my paper archives for it intermittently ever since, but I suspect if it hasn't turned up by now, it's not going to. :-()
I made my first web page in 1996, when, after a year of people trying to persuade me to make a web page, I had a lecture on the subject, and decided to give in to the inevitable—and I joined the Web 2.0 world in 2003 when, after almost a year's worth of subtle prodding fromliv and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rysmiel, I finally joined LiveJournal.
When I joined Cambridge University, I applied for an account on their elderly mainframe Phoenix (so named because it rose, not from the ashes, but from the crashes). Mine was the last year in which people had to apply for such an account; from the following year new students automatically got an account on the replacement mail system Hermes.
I didn't use the Internet (as opposed to intra-university email or IMing) much in those days; just a few emails with a friend at Westminster University. For some reason, I was very nervous about trying unfamiliar things out on a computer, in case I got into trouble—and, on a PC, everything was unfamiliar to me, as (after an initial introduction to computers on Sinclair machines) I'd pitched my tent in the Acorn camp in 1984, and remained there until the mid nineties. It took me a year to even try typing win (to launch Windows from DOS), but thereafter I rapidly discovered Usenet, in October 1993 (embarrassingly, one month into the infamous September that never ended), although I didn't try posting there until summer the following year. (I'd link to my first post, but it's lost in the howling wilderness of lost links that is the former Dejanews archive, at Google Groups. :-()
My introduction to the Web was also a little tardy. My mother sent me a newspaper article on it, but I didn't really understand what it was saying. The article included URLs at sites in Cambridge; I could recognise IP addresses, userids and paths in them but didn't get how they all fit together. I didn't find out until the summer of 1994 when, wanting to find out what this Mosaic was that everyone was talking about, I looked at the Unix manual page, which left me none the wiser, then tried typing mosaic, and the rest, as they say, was history.
(Actually, I wrote down my reaction to my maiden voyage on Mosaic at the time, in form of a description to show my family; not familiar with the terminology I flailed around in it trying to describe what was a completely new experience to me. Much to my annoyance, the document went missing a few years later; I've been searching my paper archives for it intermittently ever since, but I suspect if it hasn't turned up by now, it's not going to. :-()
I made my first web page in 1996, when, after a year of people trying to persuade me to make a web page, I had a lecture on the subject, and decided to give in to the inevitable—and I joined the Web 2.0 world in 2003 when, after almost a year's worth of subtle prodding from
liv and rysmiel, I finally joined LiveJournal.
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Date: 2012-10-15 12:22 pm (UTC)